Meet Laurax, a not-very-bold, not-that-exciting new fragrance. According to a panel of sniffers, it’s neither appealing nor revolting. It’s “intermediately pleasant”. People almost trip over themselves to describe it in non-descript terms—“fragrant”, “chemical” and “perfumery”.

Laurax isn’t going to set the perfume world ablaze in the near future, but its scientific implications are fascinating. This bizarre scent is actually a set of completely different fragrances that all smell roughly the same. It’s the odour version of “white”.

The colour that we call white is a blend of many different wavelengths of light. Add red and blue light together, and you get magenta. Add other colours and eventually, you converge on white. The same applies to sounds: if you combine tones of different frequencies, you eventually arrive at a perceptual hum called “white noise”. There’s no fixed formula for making white light or white noise. You don’t need to mix a specific set of colours or frequencies. As long as the individual ingredients are different enough, and roughly equal in intensity, whiteness emerges.

The team’s latest discovery is no less fascinating. By mixing groups of 30 differently-scented molecules, they could create complex mixtures that all smelled the same, even if they didn’t have a single ingredient in common. The result isn’t a specific odour per se, but more like a unified perception. They called it “olfactory white”. Or, for the purposes of their experiments, Laurax.

It’s not obvious that olfactory white should exist. Think about the smell of coffee, the aroma of tobacco smoke, or the scent of a rose. All of these are complex mixtures of hundreds, if not thousands, of chemicals. And yet, they’re all distinctive and easy to recognise. It’s easy to think that large mixtures of smells retain their own identities, without merging into white like noises or colours.

Weiss and Snitz proved otherwise. They worked with 86 single-molecule odours that were different from each other in terms of both smell and chemical properties. In technical terms, they hailed from all corners of “perceptual space”.

The duo diluted the individual components so they all smelled equally intense, and mixed them into almost 200 groups, each containing between 4 and 43 ingredients. They dabbed the chemicals separately onto absorbent pads so they wouldn’t react with each other, but would release vapours that mingled in the air above. Fifty-nine volunteers then sniffed the mixtures in pairs, and rated how similar they were to each other.

Weiss and Snitz found that “the more components there were in each of two mixtures, the more similar the smell of those two mixtures became, even though the mixtures had no components in common”. As more and more distinct components are added to two brews, the more similar those brews would smell. And presumably, if you added enough chemicals, everything would eventually smell the same. That’s olfactory white.

Weiss and Snitz tested this concept further by creating four fragrances, each made from a different combo of 40 ingredients, and each labelled as “Laurax”. They asked a dozen volunteers to familiarise themselves with one of the four blends over three days.

On the fourth day, they had to assign labels to four new mixtures of 1 to 40 components; their choices were “Laurax” and three names concocted by a professional perfurmer. They volunteers were more likely to describe a fragrance as “Laurax” if it had a large number of ingredients, even if those ingredients were very different to the original blend that the volunteers had become acquainted with (below, left). And if they were given 21 blends of entirely new ingredients, they could easily tell that simple mixtures weren’t Laurax, but were basically guessing when it came to the complex 30-strong mixtures (below, right). Once blends hit that 30-ingredient mark, they all smelled roughly the same.

The various olfactory whites weren’t entirely identical. People could still distinguish between different versions of Laurax, but perhaps that’s to be expected. With vision and sound, it’s very easy to blend diverse ingredients using wavelengths and frequency, but it’s much harder to do the same with the traits of molecules. It’s also hard, and very labour-intensive, to balance the intensity of the different molecules.

This is a critical point: Laurax isn’t just any large mixture of molecules. It doesn’t smell like coffee, or wine, or tobacco. When Weiss and Snitz created blends of 30 chemically similar ingredients, or blends where ingredients were unevenly balanced, the volunteers were less likely to describe them as Laurax.

Does olfactory white actually exist in nature? It seems unlikely. Most natural aromas have ingredients that aren’t as diverse in chemistry, or balanced in intensity, as those in Laurax. A rose, for example, may give off hundreds of molecules, but just one of these – phenylethyl alcohol – accounts for 70 percent of the mixture. If you spray this molecule alone, you’ll get an unmistakeable (if somewhat poor) smell of rose.

Nonetheless, Weiss and Snitz argue that both white light and white noise are also rather rare in nature, but both concepts have taught us a lot about how our senses work. Perhaps olfactory white will too. The team are now planning to study the brain activity of volunteers as they take a whiff of Laurax, and they’ve also submitted a patent “for a wide range of potential applications for olfactory white.”

And what does Laurax smell like? Not like anything in particular. When the team asked professional perfumer Danyel Gafsou to describe the various Laurax blends, he came up with a wide variety of terms. When they asked volunteers to rate the blends according to 147 different descriptions, they avoided specific ones like “leather” or “coffee”, and were most likely to choose generic terms like fragrant, chemical, perfumery, aromatic, floral, soapy, sweet, fruity and medicinal. Compared to many other smells, Laurax falls smack in the middle between pleasant and unpleasant, and between edible and poisonous. It’s as intermediate a smell as you can get.

Comments (9)

Great article. I wouldn’t have expected an “olfactory white” because, as you mentioned, most of the smells we identify as a single smell are actually complex chemical combinations (hmm…how to say that with less alliteration).

I think an apt analogy from the world of color is: colors created in one system can usually be matched with completely different materials from another system. For example, bring a cloth swatch from your furniture to your local hardware store to get matching paint. The color created with cloth substrate and dyes can be matched with a completely different system of paint base and tints. They key is, both systems have same-enough effect on the incoming light to present your eyes with an essentially identical stimulus. I wonder if the identical stimuli for the two smells happens at the sensor level (nose), or at the brain level, or somewhere in between?

Perhaps the “white ” smell is caused by a sensory overload being placed on the human ofactory system as more scents are added. Thus, once overloaded, everything smells similar or the “same.” Add too many colors and everything turns black, not white. The scents don’t change, but the human ability to distinguish them is overwhelmed. Both the nose and brain are involved as the brain does not perceive “true” reality.

johnny, it looks like you are talking about mixing paint or alike. Which gives an opposite result to mixing light about which Ed is talking. The latter you can see happening on your screen, where white is the result of mixing all three basic colors of light, the only ones your pixels have. If you do the same with the 3 basic colors of paint, you get something completely different: the color you are talking about, mostly a kind of dirty-dark brownish. This is because your screen etcetera spreads light, while stuff like paint is absorbing it.

Thanks Toos, I’ll accept your paint vs. light explanation.
However, my main point was that the “white” smell phenomena observed may be the result of sensory overload and the difference between what the nose detects and the brain perceives, as is the case with the human eye, brain and vision. See David H Hubel, Eye, Brain, and Vision [Scientific American Library Series 1988]; and Hubel & Wiesel, Brain and Visual Perception [Oxford University Press 2005].

johnny, I do know some about physics [like this about colors and light]. And appreciated it a lot, reading Ed’s post about this same kind of physics about smell. Though I don’t know that much about neurology, so I can’t – and therefore didn’t – tell anything about your point. But sure it could be of interest, especially with sources added as you did. So it’s not a denial! Just another field, as is for the discovery of Laurax [for which how the brain works with it, can stay a “black box”].

“Our dilution procedure, in which all components were equated in magnitude with the least-intense component, rendered mixtures of overall low intensity. In other words, olfactory white was in no way overwhelming.”

Quibble: White noise is not a hum, it’s a hiss. And it’s not rare in Nature, unless you consider wind to be rare.

I doubt that masking works with olfaction as it does with hearing. For instance, tobacco smoke is a very complex smell, including all the major categories of odor. It’s often considered to be ‘overwhelming’. Yet the best perfumiers were often heavy smokers.